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You may well wonder why the man who played Dirty Harry would want to make a movie about pint-sized falsetto singer Frankie Valli and his Four Seasons pop group.

If Clint Eastwood’s Jersey Boys fails to answer this musical question, neither does it make you resent the time taken to explore it. The film entertainingly recreates an acclaimed stage show that you can now see for the price of a multiplex ticket rather than a Broadway one.

From left, John Lloyd Young as Frankie Valli, Erich Bergen as Bob Gaudio, Vincent Piazza as Tommy DeVito, and Michael Lomenda as Nick Massi in Jersey Boys, the movie version of the original stage musical. (Keith Bernstein / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS)

As a bonus, it offers a little more depth than the jukebox musical. Eastwood’s affinity for outsiders, and his deep love of music — he composed the scores to most of his recent movies — gives him a unique perspective on the Four Seasons, a band never really of its time and place.

Valli and his mates made most of their close-harmony hits in the 1960s rock era, with a sound rooted in early ’50s vocal pop. They hailed from a Mob-dominated New Jersey neighbourhood where — as we’re told right off the top — they could just as easily have ended up dead in the trunk of a car rather than live on stage. Everything they did was an act of rebellion, even if they didn’t realize it.

So far, so interesting, and Eastwood hits a casting high note by choosing mostly veterans of various Jersey Boys stage incarnations. They’re led by Tony-winning John Lloyd Young as frontman Valli, the role Young created on Broadway nearly a decade ago.

Young, 38, can crucially hit all those falsetto notes in chart-bopping tunes like “Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry” and “Walk Like A Man,” and he’s a reasonable facsimile of Valli in face and stature, even credibly playing him at age 16 in the movie’s first act.

What Young lacks are the acting chops that could make Jersey Boys even more of a character study, something along the lines of what Kevin Spacey brought to the role of Bobby Darin in his 2004 musical biopic Beyond the Sea.

Eastwood and screenwriters Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice (the show’s original book writers) also retain the stage device of having the characters speak directly to the audience.

While it works well enough, here’s one area where a departure might have been advisable, especially since DeVito does most of the talking and the device is abandoned for much of the latter part of the film.

More troubling in dramatic terms is the heavy emphasis on inter-band friction caused by DeVito’s squandering of the group’s financial resources, in gambling debacles that left them all indebted to the mob.

There’s never any real sense of this threat being more than an accounting headache, especially with neighbourhood crime kingpin Angelo “Gyp” DeCarlo being played by Christopher Walken as the most lovable of rogues — he bursts into tears at the sound of Valli’s “voice of an angel.”

The more emotional issue of families torn by a life on the road gets less than optimal attention, a failing that particularly hurts the film’s female characters. Renee Marino starts out as a tiger but turns shrewish as Valli’s first wife while the singer’s troubled daughter (Freya Tingley) remains a sad cipher throughout.

The picture also would have benefited from one or two more complete production numbers, since much of the joy of Jersey Boys is watching the cast do a convincing take on the Four Seasons in their finger-snapping prime.

Also missing is any kind of context to the band’s place in the showbiz firmament. Apart from passing references to fellow Jersey hero Frank Sinatra and one throwaway line about Ringo Starr, there’s no comment about such musical contemporaries as the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Beach Boys. It’s as if the Four Seasons were the only stars on the pop charts.

On the plus side, we get to see close-up the creative process at work, as a group of blue-collar Italian-Americans work through squabbles, writer’s block and dodgy nightclubs and state fairs to build a songbook of lasting resonance. Sometimes it was all down to pure dumb luck.

Who’d have guessed, for instance, that “Walk Like A Man” was inspired by the sight of Kirk Douglas slapping Jan Sterling in the face in Ace in the Hole, the 1951 Billy Wilder film that excoriated celebrity news?

Also hitting all its marks is the look of Jersey Boys. Tom Stern’s desaturated colour cinematography renders authentic tones of the 1950s and early ’60s. A fleet of cool vintage cars provides the dual benefit of removing the story from its stage confines while also giving auto hounds some eye candy.

One artistic choice simply baffles. As Eastwood rushes towards a conclusion that takes in Valli’s solo years and more recent band reunions/reconfigurations, he skips mention of the singer’s 1978 smash success with the title track to the movie Grease.

Ironically, Valli did it as a disco number, in accordance with the dance craze of the time, rather than as a song from the ’50s, the era the movie celebrates. For once in his career, Valli was musically up to date, but the film ignores this anomaly.

Eastwood’s Jersey Boys may not completely serve either real life or the stage original, but it comes with its own “get out of jail free” card for any historical or dramatic inconsistencies, with DeVito once again doing the talking.

“Everybody remembers it the way they need to, right?” he says to camera.

Fair enough, and if you fondly recall both the music of the Four Seasons and the Jersey Boys stage show, chances are you’ll like the movie, too.

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